31 December 2007
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. development team wishes you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We hope the New Year will bring you many interesting events, new friends, positive emotions, and achievements that will improve your life.

To brighten the coming holidays, we have prepared for you some fresh materials from the prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. — Clear Sky.
The work approaches its end, and we have to work day and night to make the project what you want it to be. We are glad that we have an opportunity to finish many undertakings and ideas that the team has been working on since 2003, but, for various reasons, could complete in the original game.
What should you expect from the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Of course, the new part of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s world history, the Zone and the characters within it. Gameplay will be closer to what we originally meant it to be. There will be proper factions, with possibility of joining them and playing for them, with live bases, with leaders, traders, barmen, repairmen, and unique buildings. NPCs will behave more like stalkers within the simulation, searching for artifacts, controlling territories, working together in the war of factions. There will be new concepts of artifacts and anomalies, where artifacts cannot be found without a detector, and anomalies are vast areas with harmful effects that cannot be entered or escaped without protection. There will be blowouts shaking the Zone, as well as much more.
In creation of graphical content for Clear Sky we try to strictly adhere to realism and utmost authenticity - that quality of visual style and atmosphere of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that players have liked so much. We are making the Zone even more detailed, even more spacious. While travelling new locations of the Zone, be it abandoned villages in the vast swamp areas or a narrow street in Limansk between old houses overgrown with wild grape vine, you will again experience the feeling of immersion in the atmosphere of the Zone — wild, dangerous, melancholic, and very real!
Thank you for your attention to our project, your ideas and advice, help in fixing errors... It all helps us create an excellent game and better convey the atmosphere of the Zone. See you next year...
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. development team

It would be great if tactical-style cover commands were implemented in this game, like you see early on in the vid. STALKER with Rainbow Six-style gameplay would be utterly delicious *insert drool emotion*.